Three Hypocrisies, One Day

by Editor
May 12, 2017 at 1:27 pm

http://www.smartertimes.com/1526/three-hypocrisies-one-day

Even for a newspaper where hypocrisy is routine, the Friday, May 12, 2017, number of the New York Times is really something else, and it's a wonder that the paper's management was able to issue the thing without blushing. Consider:

The Times, which on May 9 issued a front-page geshrei about how "13 Men, and No Women, Are Writing New G.O.P. Health Care Bill in Senate," published a front page with nine bylined stories. The names on them were Michael, Peter, Michael, David, Michael, William, Peter, Adam, and Matthew. Not only are they all male, there doesn't appear to be a person of color among them. Donald Trump's cabinet is more diverse than the New York Times front-page bylines today, at least to judge by the race and gender categories that the Times is so fond of applying to everyone else.

Then there is the Times business section. One article inside the section is about the Canadian airplane and train manufacturer Bombadier. The Times reports:

Professor Moore, of McGill University, said he anticipated that major investors would push the Bombardier family to reduce its board membership. It holds six of the 15 positions.

He said it was less likely that the family would voluntarily abandon the company's structure, which gives its members 53 percent of voting control though they own only 13 percent of its equity. Many analysts have said that an end to the family's control would immediately lift Bombardier's share price, which has fallen about 75 percent in the past nine years.

Another Times article, also inside the business section, discusses an annual meeting of Ford, the American auto and truck company:

"Look, we are as frustrated as you are by the stock price," said Mr. Ford, whose family effectively controls the company through a class of shares that carry outsize voting rights. "A couple of people have said, does the Ford family care about the stock price? The short answer is yes — a lot."...The format also allowed some shareholders to call in. One of them, John Chevedden, commented on shareholder proposals that included eliminating the 16-votes-per-share rights attached to the Ford family's special class of stock. (The proposal failed on a vote of about 2 to 1.)

Ordinarily, you might think that underperforming businesses in which family heirs maintain control through shares that give them more rights than other, non-family owners might be a topic that would merit a column, an editorial, even a front-page or section-front trend story in the Times. That, however, might raise some potentially uncomfortable questions about the New York Times itself, which operates under the same structure, privileging managers born into the business over ordinary shareholders with more humble origins.

A third hypocrisy comes on the editorial page, where columnist Paul Krugman assails President Trump, the Republican Party, and the conservative movement by associating them with the Nazis:

In some ways conservatism is returning to its roots. Much has been made of Trump's revival of the term "America First," the name of a movement opposed to U.S. intervention in World War II. What isn't often mentioned is that many of the most prominent America-firsters weren't just isolationists, they were actively sympathetic to foreign dictators; there's a more or less straight line from Charles Lindbergh proudly wearing the medal he received from Hermann Göring to Trump's cordial relations with Rodrigo Duterte, the literally murderous president of the Philippines.

Mr. Krugman's piece attempting to tar today's Republicans by linking them, via Lindbergh, with Goering appears on the New York Times op-ed page directly opposite a piece by — wait for it — Stephen M. Walt. For Walt's strange obsession and conspiracy-mongering about the influence of Jews and Israel, don't take my word for it. The Times Book Review columnist Adam Kirsch (writing in Tablet, here) and the Times op-ed columnist Bret Stephens (writing in Commentary, here) do perfectly adequate jobs of explaining what Walt is. If it's guilt by association that is the game, the Times op-ed page, and Krugman, are in a glass house with Professor Walt.